Outlander

Claire Randall narrates the first novel herself, and that voice is what the books offer that no camera can. On screen you watch her. On the page you live inside her head: her nurse's eye for wounds and fevers, her wry asides, and the constant pull between two husbands and two centuries. Because the novel never leaves her point of view, you know only what she knows, which makes the eighteenth century stranger and more dangerous than it looks on television. The books also let you meet characters the show changed. Murtagh's fate, Frank's marriage and the fuller story of Brianna and Roger all read differently at Gabaldon's length and with her detail. The saga is still unfinished, so readers who love it will get the author's own ending, which the series had to invent without.

Diana Gabaldon's tenth and final novel has not been published, so the show's finale is its own invention rather than a faithful rendering. Producers have said Gabaldon shared only the last few pages of her planned ending with them. The finale does borrow from the ninth book, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, where Claire appears to use her 'blue light' healing to save Jamie after he is shot, but everything around it was built for television. The show stops adapting at that ninth novel, and its last season contains more original material than any other. That season also changes the villains. In the books Rob Cameron remains a lingering threat, while the show invents new plotlines, including bringing Buck back, to tie off threads within its own timeline. Murtagh is the largest character change. He dies at Culloden in the novels, but on screen he survives the battle, is imprisoned with Jamie at Ardsmuir, and later rejoins him in North Carolina. The first book is told entirely from inside Claire's head. The show breaks from her viewpoint to follow Frank searching for his vanished wife and adds flashbacks. It also includes an intimate scene between Frank and Claire that the book explicitly rules out. Later, Claire learns about Jamie's son William in a different way, and several book details of Brianna and Roger's relationship are left out. One commentator argues that the show recasts the saga as Claire's story, a heroic female adventure, where the books read more as a love story.